Professor Dr.-Ing. Armin Reller

Armin Reller studied Chemistry at the University of Zurich, held a chair at University of Hamburg (1988-1992) and was chair of solid state chemistry at the University of Augsburg and then was chair of Resources Strategy at the same university in 2009. Prof. Reller is Spokesman of the Center of Competence for the Environment.

Presentation

Strategic Resources for emerging energy technologies

It is a historic fact that the consumption of agrarian, mineral and energetic resources is increasing with an unprecedented pace. At the same time the diversity of functional materials used in the broad spectrum of existing and emerging technologies is also growing enormously. In many cases rather limited resources are used in essential functions, i.e. limited availabilities could lead to restrictions of industrial productions. This risk is certainly threatening the highly industrialized regions United States, Europe and Japan where natural mineral resources for many strategic metals are lacking. Considering e.g. the fact that in mobility, regenerative energy technologies, illumination technology and further key technologies a set of metals, i.e. the rare earth metals are used in different functions, the relevance of their disposability is obvious. The fact that at present more than 90% of the supply is delivered by China generates a rather critical situation. It also confirms that purely economic criteria may fail, when it comes to the validation of supply securities. Geo-political, technical or even social criteria have to be taken into consideration when the supply chain security has to be evaluated. Based on the criticality concept a set of specific and essential criteria is used for selecting the indispensable and optimal resources for the fabrication of functional materials in an early stage of development [1,2]. Thus, resource management, resource efficiency and resource strategy are integrated concepts for the designing and implementing of new functional materials.

[1]
A. Reller, Criticality of Metal Resources for functional materials used in electronics and microelectronics, Phys. Status Solidi, RRL 5, (2011) 309 – 311.

[2]
S. Krohns, P. Lunkenheimer, S. Meissner, A. Reller, B. Gleich, A. Rathgeber, T. Gaugler, H. U. Buhl,

D. C. Sinclair and A. Loidl, The route to resource-efficient novel materials, Nature Materials 10 (2011) 899 – 902.